


Your Body's A Revolution

by hes5thlazarus



Series: Lazarus' Harry Potter Daydreams [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dysphoria, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Severus Snape, Trans Character, Trans Severus Snape, Trans Snape Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27612631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hes5thlazarus/pseuds/hes5thlazarus
Summary: For Trans Snape Week 2020!Day 1, Reflection: Snape finds themselves fixed in the statues of the National Archaeology Museum of Naples.Day 2, Shopping: Who doesn't feel gender euphoria the first time they find a pair of affordable, fitting leather pants?Day 3, Hair: Lily fusses over Sev's hair. Sev brushes them off.Day 4, New Beginnings: Sev grieves.Day 5, Name: Now that Lily's dead, there's no one to call them Sev. Snape goes out to celebrate.Day 6, Passion: Snape finds music to articulate when they don't quite have the words yet.Day 7, Revolution: The conditions of release are not easy.Day 8, Peace: It's not happiness, it's not quite contentment, but Snape finds a measure of peace.
Relationships: Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape
Series: Lazarus' Harry Potter Daydreams [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954336
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	1. Reflection

Sev never knows what to expect from the mirror, so they avoid it. Faces and bodies are too malleable, and they change at each glance. Their father tries to fix them, Lily too: cut your hair. Wear something looser, or more form-fitting. Which one are you? Sev will not be fixed. Light moves on glass and their face shifts, and Sev is satisfied, because each glance brings something new. Each glass freezes a new face. In the museum they catch sight of themselves in the polished marble floor and their face freezes into something sharp, narrow, ageless, and they think: I am the statue of my own name.    
  
Severus Alexander had a rather weak chin and a beard they had little interest in growing, despite the potions. Round face, round eyes, even a dull nose: the emperor had nothing on their beak. Sev walks through galleries, inspecting statues for their own face. At least here, they do not move much, or speak, but Sev catches them rolling bronze eyes in marble slits and they wonder. In front of an expressionless statue with a narrow face and long nose, Sev sees themselves caught in its onyx gaze. They think: this is who I am. They check the pedestal for any information, but wizarding museums lack plaque. The statue remains unidentifiable. The statuery is all about the spectacle, and Sev is caught in the performance of it. None of these have any identifiable gender in those heavy marble drapes, the smooth Archaic smile, the rubbed-away paint. They stand in the center of the gallery and every statue glances at them, rolling marble eyes, and Sev thinks: this is me, this is what I want to be.   
  
Leaving the gallery, Sev decides they like the drapes. Outside car careen round the museum, disrupting the quiet they have distilled. They dodge into the narrow backstreets of Naples, careful to police their own walk, their body, face fixed in a sneer. There is a clothier in Diagon Alley who will understand what they mean when they say: “Museo Archeologico di Napoli, past the Farnese gallery. Apollo, with the tapered waist. But in black.” Face fixed in a dark stare, Sev catches themselves in a shop window and does not flinch. They are the statue of their own name, sharper and more real than Severus Alexander could ever be. Beyond the binary: Apollo, but with a tapered waist.   
  
  



	2. Shopping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Lily using "queer" not as a gender identity but as a synonym of the word "weird," Lily and Sev joking about getting beaten up for not dressing heteronormatively.
> 
> Who doesn't feel gender euphoria the first time you find a pair of leather pants that fit?

“That’s a little queer, isn’t it, Sev?” Lily comments warily. Sev throws back their hair and fixes her a filthy stare.   
  
“Got a problem with that?” they intone. “We’re going to a  _ punk show _ , Lily. The point is to  _ be _ queer.” Lily can be so boring, sometimes, not as bad as Petunia, but it was hard to be as shitty as Petunia. Their cousin Mags said he’d let them follow, as long as they dressed the part, and Tobias grunted when Sev said they were going to be out all night. Because that was the plan, to be out all night, and maybe not come back. But for a night like that, they had to go shopping, and Sev had an entire year’s worth of doing Slytherin fourth-form’s homework to spend at the thrift shop.   
  
Lily looks at the leather pants that Sev is holding triumphantly and makes a face. “Fine. But--you should  _ sanitize _ those first, mate. And the lace scarf, what are you doing with that?”   
  
“That,” Sev smirks, “is going to be a top.”   
  
“We’re going to get the shit kicked out of us,” Lily informs them. “Or at least you will. And I will run and leave you behind.”   
  
“Some Gryffindor you are,” Sev scoffs. Lily cannot puncture their good mood. They have planned for this night all week. “And I’m going to bring a jacket.”   
  
Lily starts going through the hats. Some old lady has clearly died and gone to hoarder hell. These all look like they belong in a museum. She holds up a black box monstrosity. “Why don’t you make it part of a veil? Are we doing goth make-up or what?”   
  
“Thought you  _ didn’t _ want to get the shit kicked out of us,” Sev snipes.   
  
“It’ll happen anyway. May as well look cool when we break the Statue of Secrecy and curse those muggles into the next life. Maybe we can convince them we’re vampires or some shit.”   
  
Sev intones, “I  _ am _ a vampire. Or at least Potter and his minions say so.” They place the leather pants on the rack reverently and hunch over, wiggling their fingers at Lily.   
  
“Scary,” Lily says. “You should let me paint your nails again. Black and blood red.” Lily catches a glimpse of some truly horrific paisley pants and gasps in pure pleasure. “Will you disown me if I show up wearing those?”   
  
“Nah,” Sev says. “Got no other friends, I wouldn’t dare risk it.”


	3. Hair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily fusses over Sev's hair. Sev brushes them off, as much as they can.

Lily fusses with her hair incessantly. It bothers Sev, though they do not quite understand why. It is not just the soursick smell of hair spray. Nor is it how the texture changes, and her hair gets stiff and shiny, or alternately dull. It bothers Sev that Lily cares so much, and Sev can’t be arsed.   
  
They’ve let their hair grow long, and have center-parted it and let it fall in curtains. It is not a style statement, they just do not care. They know it would look fine if they washed it, but they just cannot care. It grows long, it grows scraggly, and it grows shiny in an unpleasant way, and Sev cannot be arsed.   
  
Lily is irritated by it, and so is Tobias, and so is Eileen. Eileen brews haircare potions rather discreetly in Spinner’s End and sends them. Sev ignores the packages. Tobias just sneers. That in particular barely registers. Sev has been ignoring him for years. Lily, though, is nasty, in a way that makes her utterly Petunia’s sister.   
  
“You look like a bum,” Lily says. “You look queer. No one can tell if you’re a boy or a girl. You look weird.”   
  
Sev glowers at her from behind their curtains of long, greasy, black hair. “That’s the point,” they say. “I don’t care.”   
  
Lily scoffs. “You should care. Maybe you wouldn’t get so much shit if you just put in a modicum of effort. Made yourself look presentable.”   
  
“Look?” Sev is amused.   
  
“Well, you’ll never actually be presentable, Sev. I’m being realistic. Look at the sight of you! Hair that dark shouldn’t have a green sheen.”   
  
Sev raises an eyebrow. Lily is a bitch, but Sev is an asshole, and they can brush this off. She’s not as bad as Petunia, and she’s no worse than Narcissa or Mulciber.    
  
“It’s fine how it is,”they say. It is fine as it is because changing it would demarcate a position, and Sev is determined to stick in the craw and make themselves unpalatable. They want to see everyone blink and stare again when they realize that they are not, they are neither, the hair is a trick to draw them in and make them think. Who has time to fuss over hair anyway? The less time Sev spends on their appearance, the less time they are angry about it. The hair is a statement. They will not be fixed. There is nothing to fix. Their hair is just growing, and though Lily won’t shut up about it, they’re as pleased as they can be.


	4. New Beginnings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sev grieves.

She’s dead and the last of the old life is too. Sev feels hollow that All-Soul’s Day. They’ve cancelled lessons for the week, to celebrate and mourn the dead. The Aurors are coming. There will be so many dead.   
  
The mood in the Slytherin common room is somber and Sev looks out at their students numbly. They speak and they only vaguely understand what they are saying. Those under the age of seventeen will be protected. The Ministry will not bring dementors to Hogwarts, but the school will not protect them during breaks. If there is anything that needs to be said to parents awaiting trial, the Floo connection in the office is secure. Do it now, before the vultures set in.   
  
Sev is not invited to Lily’s funeral. Neither is Petunia. They go to Cokeworth anyway. Sluggy promises to look after the House while they’re gone. They walk the empty streets and ponder on the hollowness they feel, swaddled in black. Lily had always laughed at that, their tendency for dramatic robes. Goth was only fun for a party, not a lifestyle. Sev passes the freezing, dirty river and considers stepping down to the embankment, but it’s too gross. It was gross those summer days, when they would run wild too, but then they were so full of her bullshit they didn’t mind.   
  
Eventually Sev becomes sick of their own grief and self-pity. They Apparate back to Hogwarts’ gates. It’s cold, but they don’t want to go back inside and see anyone. They head to the greenhouses again. Pomona set space for their own ingredients, and when they open the door the humidity gushes around them like a warm hug. Sev looses a breath they did not realize they had held. They feel so empty. Lily has emptied them of everything they have ever felt.   
  
Sev shuffles down the rows of plants to their own recreational spot, their massive peace lilies. They like them because they were elegant and less poisonous than the real thing. They curl up under the massive bloom. Magic has let this one grow six feet, and of course, giving it better soil, enough place to grow. Sev touches its waxy leaves and thinks: what now? What happens next?   
  
They are emptied of the life before and feel hollow, but in that hollowness there is space for their own life to grow. They had loved Lily, nurtured it in their bones like a plant in a too-small pot, wrapping around themselves so rootbound they began to choke. But the soil has been loosened, the roots cut. It is time for new growth.


	5. Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Lily dead, there's no one around to call them Sev.

There is no one still alive who calls them Sev. The students call them Professor. The other teachers call them Snape. It is as if they’ve buried that name with Lily’s body, under that insipid statue, under the endless winter snow and sleet, and Snape says good riddance. Gone with her is the past, and the story of an old name.  
  
There are places to go and people to meet. Sluggy encourages them to go out, and to explore both sides of their life. What goes unsaid is that Sluggy made a mistake with Riddle and told him to stick to the Wizarding World. For Snape, though, Sluggy says, “You’ve got your on the threshold, Professor Snape, and you’re still young. While Lucius Malfoy brought you up in the world, you should keep yourself grounded. Go out for the weekend. Meet people you don’t know. I don’t want to see you in the lab. You’re young, and you have a life to live.” Unlike Lily, or Barty, or Bella, or even Sirius Black, Snape has been given a clean slate. So they go out.  
  
They go to a show, some shitty punk band that cannot afford to smash their guitars. They find some anonymous faces with whom to dance. The night blurs, bass burning into their bones. That is all they can feel, really--the scream and the screech and the laughter. Heated and head whirling, they head outside for a smoke. The night has an edge of snow to it. They inhale deeply, coughing slightly on the car exhaust. Some bloke comes up and offers to light their cigarette, and they, amused, let them. They scan him for revealing details. Is he a chaser? What does he think they are? But the guy’s just chatting, a friend of the band, he likes their jacket.  
  
“What’s your name?” he asks.  
  
Snape exhales that acrid smoke and resists the urge to show off. They let the smoke dissipate. “Snape,” they say. “Just Snape.”  
  
“Snake?” the guy asks. “Cool shit.”  
  
Snape cracks a laugh: close enough. “The band’s shit,” they say instead of correcting him.  
  
“The next one’s good,” he says. “Called The Cure. Goth-rock. You into Siouxsie and the Banshees? They’re going on tour with them.” Snape lets him take them back inside, and there’s the next act, barely their age, if at that, and they feel a hint of rage that their lives are so much more fun. Then the band starts, something that reminds them of surf-rock almost.  
  
“I tried to laugh about it, hiding the tears in my eyes,” they sing, “because boys don’t cry.” The guy is really into it, bouncing his head along and singing the lyrics under his breath. Snape shifts with the music, enjoying the scene. They’re a lot more polished than the group before, and they like it. The music creeps into their ears and burns into their brain, twinging their bones. It’s good to be with people their own age, who don’t give a damn, who just like the music. There’s no war on the dancefloor, and certainly none of their students or their parents in the muggle world. Here, they’re just Snape, and they can begin writing the story of a new name.


	6. Passion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape finds a new passion: listening to music, to articulate what's happening now while they still lack the words.

They’ve got time all mixed up. The school day drags on in a haze and Snape beats the recipes into their students’ heads to the tune of “Just Like Heaven.” In their personal lab, they dance as they brew, singing along to the record player Lily had charmed for them, so very long ago. They can carry the best of the past into the future, and the present is what they are passionate about now. There are conferences to attend, papers to write, potions to play with, people to meet and fuck and laugh at. A friend wants to go see Patti Smith in New York for the summer, why the fuck not? Now they have the money, why don’t they go?   
  
It’s music that keeps the blood thundering in their veins. Snape listens to the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith, and then goes back to their mother’s music. Weekends are for Nina Simone, the Who, Brian Eno. They had given the first twenty-two years of their life to Lily and the Dark Lord. Now they’re constructing a new self from radio and records, and Snape is liking what they’re listening to.   
  
The clerk at the store that is right outside the Wizarding enclave of York likes the look of them. They keep suggesting more and more eclectic jazz. At first it started with Dave Brubek, “Take Five,” and asking about favorite jazz bars, then Chet Baker, but it all reminded Snape too much of Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa’s little manipulations, so they changed the subject abruptly. The clerk, though, tried again: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus. It was Mingus that got them, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” which had Snape thinking of dodging through allies and galleon-priced bars with Regulus and Rosier and Mulciber, and “Moanin’” the rage and careening through the Hogwarts corridors, Diagon Alley when they were gunning for all the Slytherins. They like the discordance. They’re full of contradictory impulses, standing in this record shop right at the mouth of Wizarding York, and the beat and the scream articulates it. They want more. They want every bit they can get from life, and they’re determined to wrest it.   
  
Snape tells the clerk, “Friend of mine invited me out to New York this summer. Not sure I’ll go.” They’re not that articulate yet. Incomplete sentences in the muggle world, well their time itself is fragmented. They have to go back and teach classes tomorrow. It is hard to keep the selves straight.   
  
The clerk’s eyes widen. “Well, if you like jazz and punk, you have to listen to this.” They interrupted the saxophone abruptly, but not so badly that the needle scratches. Snape’s lips quirk. If the clerk had scratched it, she would’ve made them pay for it. She puts on something weird, and Snape loves it immediately. A saxophone moans out, with a low steady beat that sounds like a train trundling down the tracks. The melody is simple and haunting, perfect for a blue twilight. Flutes trill, and it winds like living ivy through Snape’s body. The clerk sees them standing still, eyes closing, and grins. She says nothing.   
  
The song continues like its own playful chorus, aching hopefully as the drum beat steadies on, instruments talking to each other, and Snape can almost catch the conversation, they’re curious, they want to know what they’re saying, and they open their mouth to interrupt but the clerk shushes them.   
  
“Now,” she says.   
  
And the chorus sings, like a tragic song out of Euripides’ one comedy, “New Amsterdam was her name, before she was New York. New Amsterdam is New Amsterdam is a dame, the heart and Soul of Big Apple city. No matter what name she goes under, I dig her deeply and no wonder, for she's been lovely to me, and I'm the better for having met her.”   
  
Snape opens their eyes. “Shit,” they say.   
  
“Moondog,” the clerk says. “He hangs out by Carnegie Hall, so I’m told. Someone told me they saw Dizzy Gillespie and Stravinsky playing with him at the same corner once. 54th Street and 6th Avenue. Take a picture for me, if you go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-kk65_HjzA&ab_channel=MarkoKrunic
> 
> ^for the song at the end, it's not on Spotify


	7. Revolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conditions of release are not easy.

What the Ministry does not garnish from their wages, Lucius Malfoy takes--for paying Snape’s room and board during their apprenticeship, so he says. Snape is tired of being broke. The school pays for room and board, and expenses all work-related matters. What is left over from their patent money barely pays upkeep and taxes at Spinner’s End. They had promised themself they would eat better than just beans on toast as an adult, but it looks like that is yet another promise they have to break.  
  
Snape starts preparing the greenhouses. Pomona catches them at harvest-time, stressing out over the cucumbers rotting on the vine.  
  
“What’s the matter?” She does not call them kid. “Go to the kitchens, they’ll prepare something if you want it badly enough.”  
  
“It’s for the summer,” they say. “I’m not staying another summer in this place.”  
  
Pomona blinks, and understands. “You’re not getting your Head of House stipend, are you?”  
  
“It’s rendered to me once I’ve been at the position for ten years,” they say. “As per the conditions of my probation. I need to prove employment stability, so my Auror says.” It’s one of Mad-Eye’s laws. It does not affect most of the old money types, who feed the court. It’s not only Snape who is fucked, they’re one of the few ex-felons treading water. The rest, if they haven’t made it to the beach, are drowning in debt. They’re lucky. It doesn’t feel like it, life should be more than just survival, but they are just barely getting by.  
  
After a long pause, Pomona finally says, “That’s ridiculous. Have you spoken to Filius about it? He’d done a stint in Azkaban, too. He only had to wait two years--reduced for good behavior.”  
  
Snape laughs. “Good behavior--what’s that?” They finish their harvest and bring it back to their kitchen, and begin the long process of pickling and preserving. Their grandmother used to croon an old labor song, “Bread and Roses.” They sing in her memory, “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses!” The Dark Lord had promised them that, at the expense of the muggle of course, and it had been yet another false promise, but He had understood the slow starvation of a joyless life. The Wizarding World has been disenchanting. Snape wants more. They deserve it, they know it, to have their hunger satisfied.  
  
At the end of the day, satisfied with the array of jars on the kitchen bench, Snape lopes off to the Hog’s Head. This at least they can expense. They sip at some terrible Firewhiskey and wonder what new privation the summer will bring. They can always sell the house, but Tobias always said never to let go of property, the landed classes had taken enough of the land, if you have a corner, defend it ferociously. Of all the things their father said, that is the least horrible.  
  
“Fuck this shit,” Snape mumbles over their glass. “We need a revolution.”  
  
Aberforth stares at them with his gimlet eye. At least his eyes don’t sparkle like his brother’s. “‘Workers of the world arise’?” he mocks. “‘You have nothing to lose but your chains!’”  
  
Snape barks a laugh, drains their glass, and coughs as they set it down. Wiping their mouth, they say, “They’re doing a good job of convincing me my chains are all I have.”


	8. Peace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape keeps busy during the summers and tries their hand at bartending. It's not happiness, they'll never be happy, but it's close enough to peace.

Where do all the quiet queers go? They come to this dive bar in Cokeworth, to brood in their beers and listen to Joy Division. Some shuffle into a dance, some people chat, and Snape keeps four bathrooms going so at least two are used for shitting and not coke. It is the greatest thing they have ever done for the Wizarding World, opening up this quiet bar, and it is revolutionary in how it shifts the conversation. Finally, they all have a place to congregate. And it whiles away the summer months.   
  
Running a gay bar-slash-cafe-slash-record shop was never going to be profitable, but it gives Snape a sense of peace. The Wizarding World is inherently campy, but comment on it and they cut you dead. Even Dumbledore stays in the closet. Here, though, all the queers come out of the woodwork, and as bartender Snape holds supreme control. They can snarl at them to leave them alone--just because they’re making them a cocktail doesn’t make them a therapist.   
  
It’s community service really, the best thing they’ve done since Lily died. Snape gives them a space and people fill it. They find a sort of peace listening in on other people’s conversation, with the bar to separate them from the others. It is as safe as the Wizarding World can be. Sluggy comes by every so often. He’s invested in the bar, makes noises about franchising, but stops when Snape reminds him of the terms of their probation. They need to spend ten years in the same stop, and anyway, can Horace really imagine them as a bartender for the next decade.   
  
“It does seem a little unlikely,” Horace says, mustache twitching. He swirls his pineapple fantasy in his glass and downs it. Smacking his lips, he sighs happily. “You do have a way with a shaker, though. What’s your secret?”   
  
“Hatred,” Snape says. Horace blinks, but Snape chuckles slightly, and pours him another glass. They could see themselves being perhaps not happy, but at peace, doing this for a bit. Not long, they like to think and act and create and fight too much to do this every night. But for the summers between horrible terms, flat broke until they get their stipend back, it’s fine. It’s not really enough, but they are not the type of person ever to be satisfied. There’s something congenital in them, where they are never quite at peace. But this is the facsimile of calm. The murmur of voices as the pale sunlight filters through the fogged glass windows soothe the leaping beat of their pulse. They do not wish they were dead anymore. They feel a perfect indifference to life, and that, as Lily might have said, is progress.   
  
One of Sluggy’s friends comes by, so Snape retreats to the other end of the bar. They’ve got two weeks until term, and they’ve been procrastinating on their lesson plans. Blott said she could get their revisions for  _ Advanced Potion Making _ out before Yuletide, but Dumbledore couldn’t change the curriculum without an eighty percent majority of the board of governors, and Borage was related to ninety percent of them so there really was no point in pushing for the new edition to be put in. Still, they’re proud of the work they’ve done, considering the circumstances.    
  
Poppy suggested they take it day by day until they could think in months again, and Snape thinks about what they have done over the past five years. They’ve gone to Naples, they’ve betrayed the Dark Lord, they’ve buried their best friend, they’ve come out. They’ve begun listening to music again. They haven’t gone to New York, but there will be a conference, and the school will pay for them to go find Moondog at his corner, and that is a certainty. In all that has happened, the fact that Snape has survived is revolutionary. They catch their reflection in the glass and smirk. For once their face sticks. Snape is no Apollo, but the robes hang better on them than the sculptor ever managed.   
  
“Your body’s a fucking revolution,” Snape mutters under their breath. The words rings true, though they don’t understand what they mean. But there is the certainty of having the next decade to find out, and that gives them the facsimile of peace.


End file.
